Examining the way in which photography mediates and shapes experience, Michelle O’Byrne’s practice engages with popular photography as a language with its own syntactical and semantic rules. The works within this exhibition explore the conventions of our photographic language and confronts the viewer with the possibilities and limits that it presents.

Metonymy within photographic language is investigated through stock photography, a form of photography intentionally produced to be used in a multitude of situations, often as a placeholder to indicate a particular ideology. The works call attention to the pervasiveness of such images and arrest their ideological function by bringing the photograph into relation with material objects and descriptive text, offering alternative avenues for meaning.

Approaching image making with an expanded idea of image, the assemblages presented undulate between language, object and image, exploring what is sayable and unsayable within the mediums and embracing the generative space between them.

An artist book that explores the poetic potentialities of image descriptors, such as key words and descriptions from archives and captions, will be produced for this exhibition. This is the first in a series of exhibitions that O’Byrne hopes to mount exploring various language structures within photography, as she moves forward she will be considering aphorisms, superlatives and similes.

Michelle O’Byrne is a photo-based artist who lives and works in Vancouver. She holds a BFA in Photographic Studies from Ryerson University and an MFA in Visual Arts at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries across Canada and internationally.—This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Capture Photography Festival